Mr. Joe Rudko presents us with his archetypical photographic style which might simply be described as a meditation on memory at Von Lintell Gallery with his opening Untitled Colors. While the work lacks that exciting bedazzlement we’d expect to find in the drunken starbursts of Western Fine Arts history, it nevertheless expounds the affirmative shift in High Art towards the cerebral, contemplative form of intimate serenity. It provides us with a placid inner moment of satisfying awakening of what so many desperately deny in vain: self-contentment.

We do not, for instance, have a jarring scintillation which, while energizing, can also leave us distanced from the artists’ lofty aims. Instead, we are open, with each work, to the mystery of the permanent continuum of unique perspectives clandestinely disclosed, forever separate from a sensory assault. And this is what this originality speaks to: the cherishment of our own inner perspectives and their significance for experiencing the wonder of it all.

‘Green’. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery and the artist. Found photographs on paper, 50.25 x 38.25 inches (127.6 x 97.2 cm)

Green gives us a quintessential example of this secretive play. We are immersed in the herbage of an elemental and earthly wonder, inconspicuously revealed to us every waking day, and yet so negligent in our own thoughts as we hustle and bustle concerned with the upkeep of contemporary civilized life and its ever-expanding affordances for being human. While we may have the appearance of a collage with a lack of craftsmanship, it is in this wordless idea assembled which gives us a stark reminder of how efflorescent the green of Earth is reflected necessarily in our own subjective uniqueness. One cannot be human without an experience of herbal green – a profound yet hidden truth revealed only through such a meditation on the concept itself.

Blue, 2021. Found photographs on paper, 50.25 x 38.12 inches (127.6 x 96.8 cm)

‘Black’, 2021. Found photographs on paper, 50.25 x 38.12 inches (127.6 x 96.8 cm)

Indeed, the compositions of all the work center ourselves on contemplating the essence of primary colors in our own distinctive lives; truly taken for granted once we recognize the possibility of color blindness. How commonly are we remiss to appreciate a memory of blue? It permeates so much of our natural world, that its quotidian presence nevertheless signifies its invisible eternity; yet again demonstrating how so much of that indestructible goodness is self-contained in our private moments – both happy and sad. How, for instance, an ocean vista can provide us with a memory of bliss with a special someone even though that exclusive formation between two souls is but a hurried second in the grand movement of the heaven and earth? Nevertheless, what we retain is that perfect simplicity, of a holy trance which resonates within ourselves, shaping and constructing what will be perceived within us for life; and ultimately, for the greater than good path of Nature’s way.